Report: Girls Face ‘Sex-Abuse-To-Prison Pipeline’

The numbers are huge: An Oregon study found that 93 percent of girls in the state’s juvenile justice system had been sexually or physically abused at some time. South Carolina research found that 81 percent of girls in its system had experienced sexual abuse.

Some are victims of sex trafficking. Some who have been abused run away from home and are truant. Some have been abused in the foster care system.

It pulls together the story of traumatized girls — and a story of punishment instead of assistance.

“Girls, and disproportionately black and brown girls, are, incredibly, being locked up when they’ve run away from an abusive parent or when they have been trafficked for sex as children,” said co-author Malika Saada Saar, executive director of the Human Rights Project for Girls.

“But their stories of unjust arrest and incarceration have been marginalized,” she said.

Once girls are arrested, they enter a system that is often poorly equipped to identify their needs and “treat the violence and trauma that lie at the root of victimized girls’ arrests,” said the report written by Saada Saar, Rebecca Epstein, Lindsay Rosenthal and Yasmin Vafa.

“Girls who have been trafficked get arrested rather than the pimps … They’re treated as criminals rather than victims,” Edelman said.

When girls run away or are truant, they are treated as status offenders.

“What happens very often is that she runs away [again] and violates her probation as a status offender … Now she’s transformed into a juvenile delinquent — and that needs to be changed,” Edelman said.

The punitive environment of juvenile detention can retrigger trauma, the report says.

“There needs to be significant mental health services in the juvenile corrections system but there just isn’t,” Edelman said.

Gavin Long’s violence stood in sharp contrast to the hundreds of protesters, many of them young people, who expressed their anger and rage at the police department with words — loud words, painful words, harsh words — but just words. (See rest of story plus slideshow in Bokeh.)

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